Richard Blunt

Artist Richard Blunt was born in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, he had a happy but pretty average childhood for a kid growing up in the eighties. His favourite place to be was outside. If he was ever inside he loved to be creative, especially with art but later on playing guitar and music.
Straight from school he went to art college to study 3D design, and although he enjoyed the course, as with many teens he was easily distracted. He soon began to lose his way and eventually dropped out of art college early. The next few years went from bad to worse, so much so that despite persistence from his family he entered
his twenties in a strange town, homeless, friendless and his only possessions could be carried in the pockets of his coat. He hadn’t picked up a paintbrush or guitar for years, but it was at this point that he started to rediscover his creative side. It was this neglected creative drive that inspired him to start writing songs and playing music again.
He spent the nex

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t few years gigging with various bands up and down the country before he finally decided to go back and reclaim his education. So he applied for university and it was a toss-up between studying art and studying music, but he went for music as at the time couldn’t see himself finding a job with an art degree.
However, while at university he was inspired to try oil painting and was instantly hooked. Before he knew it friends and family were asking if he could do portrait commissions and ironically soon the art was helping to pay for the education in music. He was determined to do well in university and it was hard but he left with a first class BA Hons.
However, he was loving painting so much that he was curious to see if he could paint some original compositions. To my surprise they turned out okay, and he was lucky enough to sell most of them too. He has since spent the last few years selling his work in independent galleries and privately while developing the style and technique that he has today.
As a painter Ihe has always been inspired by artists like Vermeer, John William Waterhouse and in particular Caravaggio. He's amazed by not only the way they painted with their dramatic use of light and realism, but by the way they managed to make their paintings look like a scene straight out of a modern movie.
He's been a massive fan of film and music his whole life; it’s hardly surprising that he took influence from them both when he first started to paint and still does today. A lot of his very early work contained musicians or scenes from films, and he still finds himself scrambling for the remote to pause a film because he's seen something that would make a great painting. However, he soon moved on to composing his own
scenes and the stories behind them. At the time he was watching a lot of Godfather-type crime dramas and was inspired not only by the period they were based within and the style that went with it but also by a muffled theme of sadness and loneliness that seemed to lurk through the films. This led to a series of paintings of an anonymous lone male figure, usually in a suit, overcoat and a trilby or fedora hat.
He only paints the things that he loves and the things that inspire him. He loves painting people, He loves painting skies and he loves to be by the sea, so most of his work contains at least one if not all of these things. He also likes to try and tell a story or create a bit of mystery. A book, film or song can do this but they have more time. The challenge for him is to capture a similar feeling in the snap shot of a single image and this is what he strives for. He is never truly happy with a piece unless he feels it holds enough mystery to stop and intrigue the viewer, if only for a moment.
More often than not he is also inspired by his own experiences .As with most artists, as his life changes, so does his work. Gradually evolving from his earlier compositions, themes of love and happiness started to emerge in his paintings. More noticeably though the lonely, anonymous male found a female and he began to use a lot more colour.